Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday December 25, 2011 @08:31AM
from the one-big-happy-family dept.

Much has been said about the (perceived) rivalry between Chrome and Firefox, but Google engineer Peter Kasting had enough when he read an article trying to discern Google's true motives for signing a new Firefox search deal. Kasting posted to Google+ to clarify what value the company sees in funding a "rival" browser. Quoting:
"People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end. So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well."

That is true, but not for the reasons stated. Google is paying Mozilla around $100 million of commissions per year. By the very nature of the deal that relationship is poisoned. Note that Peter is an engineer, and it is very easy to say they want "better web" and stuff like that, but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that, but they can't because they would lose users. Google profits from the deal, but at the same time they would want to improve their own market so they don't need to pay anyone else in future.

Nope. Google understands that diversity is good. If there's just Chrome vs. SomethingElse then the company behind SomethingElse might gain advantage by introducing incompatible features. If there's Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE vs..... then there is less probability of this happening. And Google really depends on the open Web.

And Google seems to be more than capable of actually competing with other companies rather than locking users into their products.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. Until such time, there is no reason to believe that its about anything other than the money.

If there's Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE vs.....

Well you just blew it right there. Google always defaults new services to browser sniffing and disallowing Opera, even though when Opera pretends to be Firefox that things just work. Could that be because of a small market share, and thus no money inventive, so try hard to get Opera users on Chrome? Yeah.

That's not extraordinary, they realize that if they kill funding to Mozilla that they'll almost certainly be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit and could very easily wind up being broken up. It would take some incredible hutzpah for them to even try and risk that, there's just way too little to be gained for the risk.

That's not extraordinary, they realize that if they kill funding to Mozilla that they'll almost certainly be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit and could very easily wind up being broken up. It would take some incredible hutzpah for them to even try and risk that, there's just way too little to be gained for the risk.

So its about the money, instead of the 'diversity' crap the grandparent god modded up for? Yeah. Thats right.

No, it's not right, you make it sound like both can't be the case. Google makes money from advertising and ultimately the better the web is the more money they make, that doesn't inherently preclude the notion that they want the web to be better for everybody.

Also, a lot of the folks with mod points around here are either incredibly cynical or lacking in any meaningful critical thinking ability.

Don't get me wrong, they want to be the search engine everyone uses, but they don't want the government to declare them a monopoly and come after them. If they had the One True Browser(tm) then that would be far more likely.

Besides, they make all their money on their search engine, or more properly on the ads it can serve up. Everything else is just a way of protecting and growing it. Hence it makes a lot of sense to play nice with FF, and others. They don't care what you use, so long as it talks to Google

Uhhhh...that don't make any sense friend as it isn't like MSFT and Apple where if Apple went tits up in the 90s MSFT stood there alone with a big old bullseye. If Mozilla closed shop tomorrow you'd still have Chromium AND Opera AND Safari AND IE AND Dragon AND probably another half a dozen I haven't thought of. Google is about as far from risking antitrust on the browser front as they can get and i'd argue if anything we are swimming in choices more than we have ever had before.

No lets cut through the bullshit and get to the real truth okay? Its not about "advancing the web" or any of that other bullshit its about two things and two things only: Advertising revenue and market share, plain and simple. All of Google's products come down to one thing, selling ads. Even with their numbers declining Mozilla brings them a LOT of eyeballs. if they didn't buy those eyeballs MSFT would have been more than happy to buy those eyeballs so Google shelled out, plain and simple.

Don't you just wish that once, just once, they'd quit with the marketspeak and just tell the truth? I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?

Actually the really nice thing with google is that they can advance the web and at the same time make tons of money. More power to them. Making money aint bad at all. Since consumers aren't damaged in any way (quite the opposite), i'm all for what they are doing.

Advance the web like, there's now about 10% of the sites I visit which have Chrome only functions?

Making your own stuff because you own a vast majority of the web services and now web clients, telling others "you can copy if you like" is NOT advance.That's usually what happens with monopolies. That's why there's a 3rd party called W3C to make standards - not Google. Google can propose. But they don't do that. They enforce too. Specially the things they know others will not implement (NaCl => buy game com

It is a proprietary feature to be developed, patented and delivered that increases the viability of bing on IE, and consequently makes Windows more relevant (at the expense of everyone else), in other words the bad old days.The ultimate goal is to keep googles adverts business ubiquitous (not make it so by any means possible).

Opera has negligible market share and Safari isn't usable on Windows. I had to duckduckgo for Dragon because I haven't heard of it before. You don't need to have 100% of the market sewn up in order to run afoul of antitrust regulations.

Right now you've got IE, Fx and Chrome combining for something like 90% of the web browsers used at the moment, what the other 10% are doesn't really matter that much, they're not likely to gain much traction and most of them are just reskins of the top 3 browsers.

He probably just hasn't used it in a while. The first several releases really were unusable. I've got a friend who uses it regularity on Windows. It works find now, and has some snazzy graphics to boot. I'm still a dyed in the wool Firefox users (I'm an add-on [mozilla.org] author for Pete's sake), but for what it's worth Safari is faster than Firefox, not that it matters much on modern hardware.

Dude you never tried the Dragon? it fucking rocks man! It by default (you can change it on install or after in options if you wish) will set it up so the browser and ONLY the browser uses the Comodo secure DNS which is not only excellent at blocking malware and driveby sites but if your regular DNS goes down its easy to spot with Comodo using a different DNS. It also supports all the chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox, is VERY fast and most importantly (at least for me) there is NO tracking. They remove ALL the google ID and phone home behavior of Chrome. You should try it, they even have an option on install that will make it portable and install to a thumbdrive if you wish. Just a rock solid browser and since switching my customers over i haven't heard a single complaint as they all just love the speed and ease of use!

Now this is OT but this is something that most folks forgets about that needs to be said: Today i invited a guy down the hall to Xmas dinner with my family, I just assumed everyone here would have somewhere to go but when the guy invited me to go with him to try to find a food joint open on Xmas it hit me the guy literally had nobody, nobody at all that gave a damn. I get to talking to him and his whole family is dead and the few that are left are distant kin that probably wouldn't even bother to show up to the man's funeral. So I told him to hop in the truck and I'd take him where we would get some REAL food, brought him out to my mom's and had a real old fashioned Xmas dinner with roast turkey and beef, all the fixings, and pies and pudding for dessert. I swear he ate like 3 helpings and was just thanking us over and over because i found out later his Xmas dinner was gonna be a TV dinner.

So on this holiday when so many of us have so much, family and friends, GFs/wives, more tech junk than we could ever use (I just counted and I'm up to 4 PCs and a netbook, how did THAT happen?) please don't forget to ask around and make sure that those around you aren't spending this Xmas alone because that is just damned depressing. After supper i loaded a couple of dozen movies off my USB drive onto his PC for him to watch and mom loaded him down with leftovers so at least i know they'll be one less person out there that had to have a sucky Xmas simply because nobody gave a damn. So do your little part to make this world a better place, okay?

I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?

Seconded, thirded, fourthed. Bloody Mobius-stripped! If MSFT-Bing wasn't around to snap at GOOG's heels, the world's internet advertising agency would love to make Firefox die. If most traffic went through Chrome, they could finally get serious with tracking. And when the/. crowd cried foul it wouldn't matter. There'd be nowhere el

If MSFT-Bing wasn't around to snap at GOOG's heels, the world's internet advertising agency would love to make Firefox die.

The don't make money exclusively through Chrome. Regardless of which browser you use they've got advertising services which work across them all (Gmail/Google Search/Docs etc.) DoubleClick and Ad Sense come to mind.

If most traffic went through Chrome, they could finally get serious with tracking.

More serious than having an email account which can be attached to your searches to associate your profile info with? What about Google Analytics and other client side scripts? You are aware that you can mitigate some of these risks with a VPN, disabling JavaScript, or simply not using their serv

Thanks and that is why when it came out Intel was (and still is BTW) rigging their compiler and was bribing OEMs I switched to an AMD only shop simply because i know without competition frankly it would seriously suck. I mean if MSFT had rigged Windows to tie a boat anchor to GPL code can you imagine the screams? yet they'll still support a company that has admitted to bribery and rigging the benchmarks (again still are as one reviewer who didn't know about the ICC cripple code remarked when reviewing netbo

You know what's funny?I'd trust a company telling the bare truth like that a little more. "We do it because it brings us a 11% profit over trying to crush them, according to our analysis it's the best course of action". Heck, I'd almost go work for them.

Google didn't up the price from $100 million/year to $300 million per year because firefox keeps away the monopoly man. They upped the price to cock-block Microsoft/Bing. If they're losing money to block a competitor, that's a far worse monopoly issue than a poorly managed browser losing market share.

Remind me how they have a monopoly on search and browsers again? If you choose to use their services and install their browser because it's a better product it doesn't make Google a monopoly. If I'm following your logic correctly then does McDonalds have a monopoly on hamburgers?

You're not following my logic correctly. Or at all. Microsoft was interested in a search deal with Firefox. Google tripled their offer to prevent that from happening. If (if) that's not profitable for Google, then it's anti-competitive to say the least.

People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.If Google decide not to have you on their search engine they can pretty much destroy your online business. If Google decided that everyone had to have some special tags or use some particular technology on their site to be listed or to get preferential listing, people would do it because Google are sufficiently powerful that people wouldn't really have a viable alternative. For examp

People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.

YOU are the product! Oooga booga booga!

In all seriousness, can we put this one to rest for a bit? People aren't Google's product. If anything, people's information is Google's product. Even then, it depends on exactly how you define 'product'. Personally, I think of Google's product as search because that's what the company is built around. Sure, the revenue comes from advertising, but only because that's the best way to monetize search.

Mozilla has made a lot of stupid moves to achieve this. First, they screwed up Firefox's UI. They dropped the traditional menus, they moved the tab placement, they got rid of the status bar, and they got rid of the protocol from the URL bar. These are all horrible "innovations" that Chrome introduced, and then Mozilla immediately copied.

Firefox 3.x still works fine for me. Mozilla are still putting out updates (just got one the other day).

Oblig. car analogy: Up until about 1970(??), General Motors was organized as several competing companies -- Pontiac was very happy to steal market share from Chevrolet, Buick from Oldsmobile, and each division built their own stuff. While the Google-Mozilla relationship is slightly more "arms-length" financially than the old GM model, it's the same strategy -- products & total market share improve

Gaaaah! Yes, but your counter-critism is even more flawed.Do you think that $100/$300m is a goodwill gift? No!The key points are:a) Mozilla are not a search company.b) Google make the vast proportion of their profit from search.c) This contract brings in very significant additional revenue to Google.d) It keeps that very significant market share away from it's competitor(s).

So no matter how much people think Google want a browser war, they'd over the moon if Firefox gained 100% market share - because thei

...if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product...

Not really. They're paying that money in order to be able to fight MSIE/Bing with two sharp weapons instead of one. If they cut off Firefox's oxygen and pumped the $100 million into Chrome, the pressure on MSIE would shrink and not grow. So this absolutely is a wise investment.

Indeed, Chrome has put a lot of pressure on Microsoft. Then again, everything Google does puts pressure on Microsoft. Ironically, Microsoft could have ignored all of this and focused on their core business (OS, Enterprise services, and server platforms). Hell, they could have even stopped producing a browser, shed the distraction, and continued on unabated. Now they are mired in a fight against many others in the industry, all of whom are leaders in their respective service or tech while Microsoft is an also-ran. You would think the stock holders would have some words.

In just the same way, you could tell Google to just do search and advertising and forget all that peripheral "loss leader" stuff like fancy browsers, mobile OSs and cars that drive themselves. But I don't think that would be good advice. The problem with MS is not that they're playing in too many games, it's simply that they're not winning them anymore. There might soon come a day when they actually make some great products, but nobody will buy them. This would be so ironic because about ten years ago, they

Focused on the OS, enterprise services, and server platforms and then what? They've already got extremely high market penetration in all of those areas. They need to continue to grow or they'll be slaughtered by shareholders. Search/the web is an area they have massive room for growth. Of course they're going to continue to invest funds in a profitable area they don't have a lot of exposure in currently.

Exactly. I'd like to hear the explanation from someone who holds the gate for such funds. In other words, the guy/ girl who has the fancy business MBA degree and see things in a quarterly-basis/ 5-year projection.

Google's market is advertisers. Google's conpetitors are other advertisers. Google's competitors are other eeb advertisers.Chrome and firefox are a means to an end. Google is thinking out a little bit more than most money people, wanting to (poor analogy alert) raise the tide, knowing full well it floats a lot of other boats besides its own, rather than justvtrying to hog up all of the harbor docking slips for itself.It still sees itself in a sea of plenty, rather than trying to be the only one left on the

Chrome is NOT Google's market; the web, and Google services+ads, are Google's market.They don't mind whatever you use to get there, as long as it's a pleasurable experience on which to build and sell you products.

> Google profits from the deal, but at the same time they would want to improve their> own market so they don't need to pay anyone else in future.

$100 million (or $300m, or whatever it is these days) is money well spent to keep Microsoft fighting a two front war in the browser market. Because if they ever get another stranglehold on the browser, Google and pretty much anyone else who depends on a free and open web is seriously fucked.

but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that

Why? If you assume that most of that money goes into paying for engineers and developers and distribution costs, why is it axiomatic that they must also be employed by google? If the work is good, and gets additional users to use a quickly developing browser instead of say, IE6, then mission accomplished. Firefox takes different decisions and has different emphasis than google, so if your stated goal is a well developed advancing client base, it makes sense to fund a 'competitor' in that the two different projects with different histories will meet the needs of more people than a single browser team can. Firefox has built up a lot of trust by ordinary users the last few years, a number of whom don't trust google enough to install their browser. It wasn't safari or opera that broke the back of the IE dominance, it was mozilla by offering a markedly more functional browser - and that has forced microsoft to resume work on their browser and compete again.

And after all, google tries to make advanced, compelling web apps in order to plonk adverts in as front as many eyes as possible. As any web developer who's had to build their site, and then break bits of it for IE6 in the last decade can appreciate, advanced browsers make it a hell of a lot easier to do that regardless of the name in the titlebar. And this is what microsoft feared and tried to stop for years - web-based, standards compliant advanced apps that run on any platform. When the browser is the platform, who cares what OS it runs on; and thus who needs to keep paying such extortionate prices for windows, and by extension, office? Obviously we're not there yet, and there will always be heavy duty stuff that can't be OS agnostic, but for most people, most of the time, it's becoming far less important what OS you have as long as it runs say, webmail, facebook and whatever sites you personally hang out on. We've cloud books, cloud music, cloud films, cloud email, cloud document apps, cloud productivity apps of whatever stripe, online banking, social networking, cloud photos, the list just keeps on growing. Just look at the roaring growth of smartphones, netbooks and tablets - most of what they're used for is a browser, apps that's basically some form-factor specific UI that gets or dumps everything onto some html5 website, or games.

Competition is good, and it means that people who aren't google can come up with ideas that we can all then benefit from, including google themselves. It's good that google themselves realise that.

It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that, but they can't because they would lose users. Google profits from the deal, but at the same time they would want to improve their own market so they don't need to pay anyone else in future.

Please just ponder:

- What is exactly Google's product? i.e.: What exactly are they getting money from?- What is exactly Google's market? i.e.: Which users do they need to win to earn more money?

Google *is* developping Chrome, yes. But Google *is not* selling Chrome. They do not get money from Chrome. It doesn't matter to them if more or less people are using Chrome, they won't earn money from it.(Unlike Microsoft which is also earning money from selling an OS+Browser (+a few other application) Bundle)

I don't agree. Google wants the web standards that allow their products (sites) to work well to become standards. The browser is the means to this end but for a web standard to become a standard requires more than one browser to support it. By funding Mozilla they can encourage this to happen. He's absolutely right in saying that Mozilla "winning" is not an issue however they would probably like it not to win too much so they can continue to exert pressure on new features through Chrome.

Their product is search. Mozilla is one way of getting to their product. Chrome is another. They benefit from there being a sufficient number of sufficiently fast and well engineered ways to get to their product. That's all.

People seem to think that Google is some kind of non-profit charity, powered by rainbows and idealism, with a unicorn as their CEO (and a pony as VP). You can't buy that kind of brand loyalty and PR. It's thoroughly amazing, and, yet, also disturbing, because along with it comes a reluctance to pay any attention to criticism. It doesn't help that Google's detractors, for a long time, were spammers, SEO professionals, shills, and other assorted scum.

I liked Google a lot back when it first became popular. It was clearly the best search engine. They eventually started diversifying into all sorts of things, while always collecting more and more information on their users. Fine. That's how they make their money. I don't begrudge them their demographics information, but if you listen to the average person, Google is doing all this out of the kindness of their hearts, to better make a utopian society, and the whole advertising / data collection business is a distasteful, necessary evil that Google engages in, because they need to fund their good works. And that's if they even recognize that there's a trade going on here. A lot of people, if they see no price attached to something, think that it's completely free, with no associated loss of privacy as a price. Nothing is ever free, in that absolute sense. Even if there's no price, it's still got an opportunity cost.

Microsoft or IBM would literally kill to have this kind of PR. Yes, literally. I think they would outright murder a homeless man tomorrow, if they thought it would buy them this kind of sentiment from the public. Apple is about halfway there, but I think that it's more likely that Apple is a nascent religious cult, as opposed to the true believers lining up to join Google's utopian society.

It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find software projects that don't have some ideological drive behind them. You can't just use a program. You're buying into a worldview. Oh well. I guess it could be worse. At least we're not stuck with IE 4 and Netscape Communicator.

Admitted Google fan boy. Google is still clearly the best search engine. If anyone is concerned with privacy they can find ways to use Google without divulging "personal" information. Facebook has many times more accurate personal information than Google could ever dream of gathering.

Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm not a hater... just a cranky critic. Facebook is infinitely worse, and I'd rather have a hundred Googles than one Facebook. Google admittedly does a lot of good for the web, but I can't think of a single thing that Facebook has ever done that benefits the web. I rewrote my original post, because it seemed to be too negative. Maybe I should have rewritten it again, to make it even less negative, but it does seem somewhat even-handed to me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to massive flamewars and melodramatic rants, anything that's not trollishly polemical seems even-handed and neutral. To be honest, I think that whenever I write anything on the internet, it comes out at least a bit too harshly worded. So, in conclusion, I don't hate Google... but I certainly don't love them, either. I'd say that I'm vaguely dissatisfied.

It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers

I am sure this is what he has in mind:

It's important for Chrome to actually gain tons of users because that potentially creates more search traffic for us, complementing our efforts with Android on the mobile front.

In fact, Chrome's current momentum, which has enabled it to grab more than the initial goal of 10% worldwide usage does not hurt at all.

The only problem with your theory is that those that are jumping ship to chrome is likely already using Google search.

The real reason that Google pushes chrome is to ensure that they can drive the direction of web standards. In other words, chrome gives them a large say in how the web moves forward.

What people tend to forget is that Google isn't a software company. They are a company that indexes and provides access to information, which currently is funded by ad-sales, but is not limited to this business m

The overwhelming thought that comes to my mind is that this poor engineer has actual bought the company line. All that kool-aid drinking thats so common at giant tech companies actually works on some people. He's a naive young engineer, who truly believes what he is saying. And that means that Management has done their job.

Listen up, kiddo... You think you know [b]why[/b] Google is building Chrome? LOL. What you think the "corporate strategy" is, is actually just the part they tell you to motivate you. So

First they laugh at youThen they fight youThen they bribe youThen they win

Wait. What?

Basically what he is saying is that as long as Firefox does what they want (Advance the web, whatever that means) they will keep funding. Once Firefox stops doing that, the money will be gone. That means Google has as least some sort of influence of what is going on. Sure it is their right, but with their own browser, they will be extremely tempted to direct things. e.g. never make any google blocking default part of Firefo

How would I now know if decisions are made because of what users want or of what google wants?

Why should it be the way users want? If Red Hat pays people to work on the kernel, they work on what Red Hat want not what "users" in general want. If Google pays Firefox's bills, why wouldn't they be doing what Google wants? Apart from the extremely small minority that's contributed to Firefox, most of their users are simply product like TV viewers. The money made = number of people watching * number of ads, it never makes sense to made of those zero because then the total is obviously also zero. In other

I find it hard to believe anyone really thinks letting Mozilla die would be a benefit to Google. It doesn't take a doctorate in Sociology to know people like choice. If they are limited in choices the more likely the choices become "the greater between" style evil. eg Nutscrape v. Internut Exploder. There were fans on both sides. There were haters of the other side. And more importantly, there were haters of both because there were little alternatives (at the time). What Google wants is not to get any of that hate. Keeping them a player and a partner improves the real game, traffic to Google. How people get there is unimportant.

It's not very clear but what you mean, is that only Google and IE are left, there will still be many IE users using Bing.If Firefox is there too, and uses Google search, that's many users which could have been using IE instead of Chrome.

That's true. Although it's not all there is to it, its certainly part of it.

The *Google* engineer post about how is company is an angel and he doesn't get how *people* don't want to "understand" (the word he's looking for is *believe*) his point of view, he gets all mad. In

Google engineer demonstrates why he's in engineering rather than marketing or sales. Details at 11.

Google is spending $300 million / year to:

- Make sure that users of the popular Firefox browser continue to see Google's search engine, and thus Google's ads by default.

- Make sure that Firefox users continue to NOT see Microsoft's ads by default.

End of story. There's no magnanimity here, no making the world a better place. Just business. For that, $300 million / year sounds like a bargain.

Think about it. How much do you think Google pays Apple to make sure that Google is the default search engine for Mobile Safari? Think that Apple does that for free? Same exact deal with Firefox. But throw in a quaintly deluded engineer's explanation of things.

Google engineer demonstrates why he's in engineering rather than marketing or sales. Details at 11.

Probably true... but you have to realize that at Google, decisions are made primarily by engineers, for engineering reasons. Fully half of the employees are engineers, nearly all of the managers are engineers, and engineers' voices are the ones that carry the most weight and drive the decisions. The truly amazing thing is that the lack of marketing or sales focus in the company's direction hasn't driven it into the ground.

People find it really hard to believe, but the truth is that Google employees really

> but you have to realize that at Google, decisions are made primarily by engineers, for engineering reasons. Fully half of the employees are engineers, nearly all of the managers are engineers, and engineers' voices are the ones that carry the most weight and drive the decisions.[citation needed]

I still would like to ask Google why they dont support Opera in their services if they are so concerned for the betterment of the web. Opera has been a prime contributor in the web and browser technologies. I dont doubt Google's motives, but there is this fact, too. I will hate it if a small market share is the only reason behind that.

Opera came to my mind because Google was worrying about the betterment of the web. As i wrote in my previous comment, a smaller market share should not be hindering this.
As far as your skepticism about Opera is concerned, Opera have kept innovating web and browsers. They havent contributed anything but good to the web.
On the other hand, Google recently has been launching features in their services that are Chrome-Only. I really doubt if that is good for the web.

And tried to charge money for them, when others were starting to offer them for free. Every time a thread about browsers is posted here, some member of the Opera team comes on here to tell us how Opera had everything first. Well, I'll give you that. Opera introduced me to tabbed browsing, and I loved it. Then they put ads in the fucking browser unless you paid for it, and I found a different browser.

Yes. It charged money in the era where free browsers weren't quite around (till 2000), and Opera had to make money from somewhere. After that, it became free and started supporting ads; again, because they had to get some revenue - the current revenue system of making money through search engine (i.e., Google) wasn't there yet. The ads got removed after that.
Internet Explorer was free then, obviously because of the backing of Microsoft. Firefox came into play around 2004 - same time around where Opera also

Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web

mozilla is a foundation to promote software.

google is a COMPANY whose goal i to PROMOTE ITSELF.

stop playing the fool, people. google is not out to help you. they are out to make a profit.

the biggest con is that google created a marketing jingle (sans tune) that goes 'do no evil'. its a lie and most of us knew this from the very start. a company (in america, especially) HAS to be profitable and has to be absent of ethics (well, its not a must-have but it surely helps).

google wants lock-in and they want to serve ads. they are NOT doing things 'to better the internet'. almost everywhere I go (on major websites) when I visit some i/o happens and goes to google. when I order electronic parts, some googleapis site gets triggered! I can't escape google even if I tried, and I have most of their domains blocked.

google is quite quite evil. every one of their plans should be carefully inspected and the real motivations exposed.

yeah yeah, the kids working there get free lunches and shirts. they are bribed to look the other way and they're in their own little bubble, insulated from much of the rest of the world.

google, like the devil, has a great accomplishment: convincing the world that they are not evil. ooooh, shiny websites! they CLEARLY have our interests at heart.

pathetic how we eat up this drivel.

google is the new microsoft. make no mistake who your friends are. google would sell you out as fast as facebook would. neither are your 'friends'.

how exactly are they locking anyone in? they provide functionality to export your information out of their system. for everything they offer, there's no shortage of alternatives. i just don't see the 'lock in' that you're blathering about.

>CLEARLY have our interests at heart.

well, you could argue that NO company has your interests at heart. If so, how do you function in t

Is it really that hard to believe that someone has to come up with far fetched ridiculous reasons like anti trust (anti trust with browsers makes no sense, chrome is never going to become a monopoly on the desktop and with growth in mobile it doesn't matter anyway)?

There is nothing underhanded and Google doesn't need to do anything underhanded. Sure there's some marketing speak in Kasting's post. But the bottomline is this does suit google's own business plan, the web's their space, they're not interested in competing with Mac OS and Windows directly. And they can't rely on IE and Safari being the interface to the web, they want to push them in the direction where Google wants to go and where their strength lies. Mozilla does it just fine because open works in Google's favour.

It's the same reason that Microsoft has advertised on Slashdot. By making the deal with Mozilla they get to be the default search engine on one of the most popular browsers. That is a lot of eyeballs. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the next contract replaced Google with Microsoft. Ad agencies go where the eyeballs are, does this really surprise anyone?

Well, since they don't care about users--or usefulness--but only about "technology," perhaps that explains the lack of basic features, like the inability to resume downloads [google.com]. Perhaps it also explains some of the "over-engineering [google.com]" going into such basic features. *sigh*

I have accentuated so many times that competition is not good for anyone. Every competitor, customer and whole world suffers from competition.

Alternatives and teamwork is the only real way to go.

Example now with Google and Mozilla, both support standards together, both develops standards together, they help each other and they share best ideas and results to everyone so they get taken in use. But still all the time, both offers alternative for other product. Customer can choose what works best for them, sti

Of course they're trying to increase the web and make it better, faster. They're trying to make the web compete with full-fledged Operating Systems. Google doesn't care what browser you use, as long as you're using one that lets them develop their own infrastructure and deploy their own products.

Google has no reason to try and "crush" Firefox. Firefox is irrelevant to them. What they're really after is killing Microsoft, Internet Explorer, and getting their services such as Google Docs, GMail and more into businesses. They don't care about the browser as much as they want to compete in an area where they know they will win. Such an area would be web apps and web infrastructure.

Don't think about this as a browser war as much as a platform war. Microsoft's platform is Windows, Google's is the Web. Google just realizes that if the web was better and more fluent, they'd have a larger market and a bigger piece of that cookie.

Yes, Google are producing Chrome because, either directly or indirectly, it advances the web as a platform. The thing is, they're only doing it because the web IS their platform. It's hugely advantageous to their business model that the web is a viable platform for their products in the years to come. What I object to, is Google trying to suggest that the ultimate reason for producing Chrome is anything but commercial. Don't get me wrong, I love Chrome and the impact it's having on the whole browser market,

I remember well what was in the 90s, before open source MySQL and PHP. I remember well that one has to pay thousands for some "architect version", "gold business version" just to get a simple database online.

Even in Chrome becomes better than Firefox I would keep using Firefox. Because as soon as a commercial solution has a monopolistic chance it will use this chance. It is a part of human nature. So we never should be lured by a single perfect piece of a commercial soft.

I am no game theorist, but common sense tells me that A should dispose of B later rather than sooner, since B is in its pocket anyway. Together, their 66% has a much better chance of taking over the other 33%.

Whereas if A first destroys B by withdrawing funding, then B's userbase is likely to bifurcate and go